‘I heard. And he’s hanging on to the German Desk and running the Europe Desk too?’
‘Only because Fiona is there to do the real work – trying to keep the networks running on less and less money.’
‘Any familiar faces in Warsaw?’
‘Only Boris.’
‘Boris Zagan?’
‘Who else.’
‘Was that girl with him?… the German one?’
‘Sarah. Yes, she was there. She’s married to Boris.’
‘Is that so? The way I heard it she was whoring for him.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
He opened a simple but beautifully made wooden box. From it he took a sword and held it up to me. ‘Personally inscribed as a presentation sword for General Hoyotaro Kimura.’
I looked at it and nodded my appreciation. But swords all look very alike to pacifists like me.
Perhaps sensing that, he added: ‘Burma: the commander of the Japanese 15th Army.’
‘Yes,’ I said as he put the sword away in its box again.
‘You were always sweet on her. In Berlin… when you were a teenager doing little jobs for your dad. I remember you were mad about her then.’
‘No,’ I said. Harry looked at me with raised eyebrow. ‘We were just kids,’ I said. ‘Silly teenagers.’
‘Not her. She’d grown up in a hurry. Women had to grow up fast in Berlin in those funny old times. She was jumping into bed with everyone who beckoned. Five cigarettes a time is the way I heard it. American cigarettes.’
‘You always were a romantic,’ I said.
‘And you always were a pragmatist, weren’t you, Bernard?’
‘I don’t know; I’ve never pragmarred.’
‘You didn’t come down here so that your kids could play hide-and-seek among my dead cabbages. And to get a bellyful of canned lager and that lousy rubber quiche, which I notice even you didn’t finish.’
‘Why did I come?’ I said.
He stared at me and furrowed his brow as if thinking about it for the first time. ‘Perhaps because I spent nearly five years sitting in the Deputy Director-General’s office filling in his appointment books and keeping the riffraff at bay. That’s usually why Department people want to see me out of office hours.’
So there were others? He’d only been retired five minutes. Or did he mean before retirement? ‘Never a social call?’
‘Sometimes. But not from you, Bernard. You are not a starry-eyed teenager any longer. You haven’t been starry-eyed for a long time. You’ve changed a lot.’ I wanted to explain but he waved me silent. He’d warmed to the idea of guessing what I had come to discuss with him. ‘Which year would it be…’ he said, as if thinking aloud. ‘It won’t be anything about your dad. I wasn’t there at the right time to have ever dealt with your dad’s personal files. No, it will be something about that time when the German Desk fell vacant, and you and Dicky Cruyer were the contenders for it.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘You had a lot of ardent supporters, Bernard. Let me say it – you were the best man for the job. Is that what you wanted to know about? The arguments and the meetings and how the old man finally turned you down for it?’
The pained smile was back on his leathery face. His eyes moved as if he was daring me to say yes. As if he could provide me with some remarkable and scandalous facts if I wanted to hear them.
‘It wasn’t about that,’ I said.
‘No?’ His face was set in that jovial but omnipotent grimace that you see in cheap bronze Buddhas. After his field work he’d come to the office and ended up as a not-unusual example of the Eton Oxbridge Buddha class: sadistic, self-sufficient apparatchiks who controlled Whitehall by stealth, wealth and consanguinity and – no matter how friendly – inevitably closed ranks against intruders like me. Could I have become a Harry Strang? A close friend of my father, Silas Gaunt, had put my name down for Eton and offered to pay the fees, but my self-made father was strongly opposed to having his son made into a janissary who would fight the battles of the ruling class. Better, said my father, that I remained with my family, went to the local school with the Berlin boys I played with in the street. My father told his friends (although he never told me) that I would grow up with such an intimacy with Germany and Germans that I would inevitably rise to become Director-General.
Well, Dad proved wrong. A Berlin school – even if you were the top scholar there – was no preparation for Whitehall. Or for boys like Harry Strang and Dicky Cruyer, who had grown up learning how to survive the loves, tears and terrors of expensive English boys’ boarding schools; learning how to conceal all human feelings until they faded and stopped coming back.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to know about the night we brought my wife out of the East.’
‘What can I tell you about that, Bernard? You were there. You shot the bastards who trapped her. You brought her to Helmstedt and safety.’
‘I need some background,’ I said. ‘Who gave the order? Who chose that night for it?’
‘You remember. There was that fancy-dress party… Half Berlin was celebrating at Tante Lisl’s hotel. It was perfect timing.’
‘There must have been a written order?’
‘No. It would have been left to the people on the spot.’
‘I don’t think so, Harry,’ I said. ‘Frank Harrington, the Berlin Rezident, was technically the senior man. He certainly didn’t know it was happening until the Sunday morning. Dicky Cruyer, from London, was at the party. He came out to find me and ask what was happening. Who gave the order, Harry? It would require at least twenty-four hours to fix up all the preparations. There was a chopper waiting at Helmstedt, and the RAF positioned a big transport plane for us. We were flown directly to America that same night. There was a hell of a lot of planning. Inter-service planning; you know how long that takes.’
‘Yes, you’re right. There were a lot of people on standby: soldiers, field agents and our own liaison people at the border posts. It’s coming back to me now. The RAF were phoning and complaining about the delay. They’d been told to supply a doctor, and after six hours waiting in the transit barracks the quack buggered off to a local bar and got paralytic drunk.’
‘So who arranged it all?’
‘You did, in effect. You were briefed by Frank weren’t you? You went to the rendezvous and blew away two Stasi men, or KGB or whatever they were.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘It was in the report you wrote.’
‘I never wrote any report.’
‘Then you must have told Bret Rensselaer when he debriefed you in California.’
‘And he told you?’ Harry smiled one of his inscrutable smiles. Artfully he had led the conversation away from my question. ‘But I am still curious about who gave the order. When was the decision made? There must have been meetings with someone at top level.’
‘There was no time.’
‘Even a phone call would have gone into the log, Harry.’
‘Not this one.’
‘Planting my wife in the DDR was the greatest hit the Department ever scored. It was vital to bring her out happy, healthy and intact. It had to be a story to be told to the politicians, and that means one with a happy ending. The decision about when and how to bring her out was going to be decisive. The D-G would have to be kept informed, even if he didn’t give the order.’
‘I was the personal assistant to the Deputy, not to the D-G himself. The D-D-G was not always a party to the day-today operational doings. Especially tricky ones.’
‘That famous Strang total recall is letting you down, Harry,’ I said. ‘You weren’t with the Deputy at that time. The D-G’s PA was in hospital; you worked for the D-G while the Deputy’s secretary filled in for you with the Deputy.’
‘What a memory you’ve got, Bernard,’ he said, without demonstrating unbridled admiration or delight. ‘Yes, of course, young Morgan was in hospital with gunshot wounds.’ He smiled. Morgan – the old man’s personal assistant ?
?? had suffered multiple minor wounds to his leg when a fellow guest at a weekend shooting party discharged a shotgun by accident. By the time the story got to the office, it was inevitably Morgan’s arse that was the target, and in some embellishments it was an irate husband who fired the gun. Harry Strang allowed himself a chuckle; Morgan was not the most popular man in London Central. I waited. I could see that Harry was putting something together in his mind. ‘Yes, there were meetings. But I don’t know who he was with, or where they took place.’
‘Away from the office, you mean?’
‘You know what the old man is like. He’s getting old and eccentric. He pops up here and there, like a jack-in-the-box. That’s why he’s always had two duty drivers. There were days when he was not in the office at all. The Thursday and Friday before the weekend that Fiona came out. On those days the D-G didn’t come in to the office at all as I remember it.’
‘It’s been great, Harry. But I must be getting along,’ I said, getting to my feet.
‘I wish I could give you more details.’
‘It was just idle curiosity,’ I said. ‘But I suppose we’ll never know the whole story.’
‘Not many people know the whole story about anything,’ said Harry.
‘Can I help with the washing-up?’
‘I have a machine,’ said Harry.
‘I’ll see if the kids want to use the bathroom.’
As I got to the back door Harry touched my arm. ‘You should have been given the German Desk, Bernard. Everyone said so. But the old man was against it.’
I opened the back door and shouted: ‘Sally! Billy! We’re leaving now. Come and say thank you to Uncle Harry.’ The clouds had become a cauldron of molten lead, silvery-grey cumulus boiling and swirling around the red blobby parts. And yet the sky behind the clouds remained clear blue, as if from some other day and some other season.
‘They treated your dad badly,’ Harry said softly as we watched the children slowly and reluctantly getting out of his old car. ‘The D-G was afraid that giving you the German Desk would seem as if the Department was trying to make amends for that past wrong they did your dad, and for God knows what else.’
‘We couldn’t have that,’ I said sarcastically.
‘No, that would never do. You won’t stay for tea?’
‘I must get back on the road,’ I said.
The children arrived breathless, having run from the end of the garden. ‘Do you want to use the bathroom?’ I asked.
‘What does a Frenchman eat for breakfast?’ Billy asked Harry Strang. He’d already used his joke on me.
‘I don’t know,’ said Harry, playing along with him.
‘Huit heures bix,’ said Billy and laughed. Sally laughed politely too. ‘Weetabix,’ Billy repeated, in case we had missed the joke. Harry produced a fine baritone laugh.
‘It’s a long drive to Grandma,’ I said.
‘It will seem even longer if he tells us all his corny jokes,’ Sally said.
‘Dad said he likes corny jokes,’ said Billy. ‘I save them for him. Isn’t that right, Dad?’
‘There’s no joke like an old joke,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ said Harry. ‘It’s like friends.’ He looked at me as if trying to decide whether our friendship had anything going for it.
Billy went upstairs to the bathroom while Sally cleared away the dishes on the table. Harry began putting his swords back into the cupboard where they belonged.
‘Lovely kids, Bernard. They are a credit to you. I thought your boy would have been keen on the swords.’
‘He is,’ I said, ‘but he hates white gloves.’
‘You can’t handle them with your bare hands,’ said Harry, who was not renowned for joke recognition. ‘The acid perspiration would destroy the blades.’ Harry looked at each sword lovingly as he put it away. ‘Yes, nice kids. Count your blessings, Bernard.’ Harry’s voice was different now; warmer and more trusting. ‘I wish my marriage had lasted, but you can’t have everything. It took me a long time to realize that, but it’s true.’
‘When did the heavy-glove men come here, Harry?’ I said. ‘Am I a lot too late?’
‘Don’t be silly, Bernard.’ The shutters came down with a clang and his face was blank.
‘Yesterday? Last week? What did they say they would do? They can’t touch your pension can they?’
‘Careful how you drive, Bernard. Those Frenchmen, in the big trucks coming from the ferry, drive like maniacs. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all that vin rouge.’
‘How do they do it? I’ve often wondered. High-level, low-level, or anonymous? Do they send one of those bastards from Internal Security?’
He smiled another of those mirthless smiles. It completely prevented one reading anything into his expression; maybe that’s why he did it. ‘I miss the old man,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed my time working on the top floor. And Sir Henry is a gentleman of the old school. Even during the hectic days when your wife was coming out, he went down to pay his respects to Uncle Silas. He kept in touch to make him feel he was still a part of things.’ Harry looked at me. ‘Uncle Silas was sick. He’d fallen off a horse, they said.’
‘He was too old for horses.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Harry sharply, as if I had suddenly solved a mystery that had puzzled him.
I knew it was as far as Harry would go. In reversed circumstances – with a pig-farm and pension in the balance – it was perhaps more than I would have risked for him.
As we were departing, Harry’s young farm-hand came up the path carrying a bucket of newly dug potatoes. He was very muddy and looked perished with the cold, but he wore the same gentle bemused smile that he’d worn when showing us his favourite porkers.
‘Come along, Tommy!’ Harry shouted to him. ‘Come in and get warm. I’m brewing up some tea.’
6
Mayfair, London.
‘What a lovely idea – to take the children to see your mother. How is she?’
‘She’s fine,’ I said.
It was typical of the polite exchanges that enabled our happy marriage to continue so smoothly. Fiona didn’t really think it was a lovely idea that prompted me to take our children to visit my mother. She thought it a stupid, inconsiderate exploit that was done to worry my mother-in-law and annoy my father-in-law while leaving her to soak up their dismay, anger and resentment. And my mother was not fine. She was anything but fine. She was in a nursing home that she didn’t like, and the only time I saw flashes of the mother I remembered was when she was showing her annoyance about being incarcerated far from her friends and the home she loved. But despite everything my mother said, she was seriously infirm and incapable of living on her own. I’d taken the children to visit her only because I thought she would be dead before another year was past.
‘Good,’ said Fiona, and smiled to show me that she could read my mind. She was wearing her magnificent fur coat. She became almost animal in that soft glistening sable. It made her remote and exotic; so that I found it difficult to remember that this lovely creature was my wife.
‘Shall we go out for dinner?’ she said. She’d been with the D-G almost all day, and I could see she’d had her hair done and put on her extra-special make-up for him. She was standing by the stove-top reading an almost indecipherable note left there by Mrs Dias. The indomitable Mrs Dias had cooked our meals, minded our children, washed, swept and cleaned for us – and piled up astounding hours of labour – back when we lived in Duke Street, before Fiona had pulled her defection stunt. Now Fiona had tracked her down and persuaded her to work for us again. I’m sure the smart Mayfair address, in an apartment block with lords and ladies and recording stars, was an enticement for Mrs Dias, who was, like most domestic workers throughout history, a resolute and uncompromising snob.
‘We said we’d economize this month,’ I said.
Fiona was still reading the note. She’d let her nails grow longer and today they were painted, albeit in a natural pink col
our. She looked up. ‘I can never read her handwriting. Sometimes I think some of the words must be Portuguese.’ Then: ‘I’m sorry, I forgot about the economy drive. I had no time to shop, I’ll dig something out of the freezer.’
‘Do you want a drink?’ I said.
With no more than a glance at the opened bottle of Bell’s on the kitchen table in front of me, she had noted its level. ‘Not whisky,’ she said, ‘but I’ll have a tonic water, and sit with you for a moment. I’m absolutely exhausted.’ She took a chilled can of tonic from the refrigerator, a cut-glass tumbler from the shelf and then ice from the dispenser.
This apartment, a legacy from Fiona’s wealthy sister, was extraordinary. The kitchen had been cleverly designed to conceal its function. It had fake-antique cupboards in which to hide away the saucepans and crockery so that I could never find anything. The refrigerator was disguised as wall, and the twin ovens concealed behind decorative tiles. Every working surface was stark and bare, and lingering in the air there were the scented sprays with which Mrs Dias staked out her territory. As usual she’d been through the whole apartment mercilessly eliminating all traces of human presence. Flower arrangements past their prime were protruding bent and broken from shiny black trash-bags. No trace now of food or drink; of bowls of peanuts, half-read books, carpet slippers, newspapers or magazines, or any other evidence that human beings had ever passed this way. What this morning had been a comfortable apartment now looked like a set erected for a photographer from House and Garden.
‘Everything all right with Mrs Dias?’ I asked cheerfully.
‘It’s about her money,’ said Fiona, still examining the note. Indecipherable writing or not, this was a safe bet.
‘Sit down,’ I told her. She looked uncomfortable standing there in her fur coat, hands resting on the back of the Windsor chair.
‘I’m better standing. It’s my back again.’ As if in demonstration she arched her back and grimaced. ‘I’ll be fine if I stand for a minute.’ There came an impatient fanfare of assorted car horns from the street below. This was the penalty for living in the most exclusive part of London’s West End. Here were the nightclubs, fancy restaurants and top hotels and the never-ending noise of traffic, car doors slamming and the high-pitched exchanges of the rich and famous. Fiona gave up reading and dropped the note on the table.